4th June 2010 Archive

The Gizmodophone saga lurched another step forward Thursday when the chief deputy district attorney for San Mateo County, California, the jurisdiction investigating that misplaced/stolen/repurposed next-gen iPhone prototype, announced that a court-appointed agent had begun to search equipment seized from a Gizmodo editor.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer and chief software architect Ray Ozzie put on a poor performance when quizzed by Walt Mossberg at the All Things Digital conference, judging from the live blogs of the event.

Less than a year after its initial release French e-reader maker Bookeen has released an updated version of its Cybook Opus e-book reader, reviewed last year. The most obvious change, but fairly irrelevant, is the new range of seven colours, instead of just plain white. Colour schemes aside, the important upgrade is the new firmware which Cybook calls Boo Reader.

New Coalition government biznovation minister Vince Cable has set out his stall in a speech given yesterday at a business school in London. He pledged to cut the red tape stifling small businesses, and said he would compel banks to lend to SMEs.

Many of the sweepstakes being run at workplaces ahead of next week's football World Cup are likely to be illegal, according to an expert in gambling law. Sweeps with informal tickets and even those where some proceeds go to charity can be illegal.

Here's the perfect plan to solve all those pesky security problems. Confidentiality and data leakage, secure backups, individual privacy, data integrity, identity and access management - all can be dealt with in some way by encryption. So why don't we all just use it then, and be done?

"The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated." Was it Mark Twain who said that, or WiMAX? News of the poor 4G technology's imminent death have surfaced again with some vigour, with blame squarely aimed at the growing support for the unpaired flavour of LTE - known as TD-LTE - which offers holders of unpaired spectrum a ticket into the LTE ballgame.

The government has broken the seal on its UK public expenditure data by releasing the entire contents of the Treasury’s Combined Online Information System (COINS) that details spending undertaken by the previous administration for the past two years.

IT projects can arise from the most interesting of circumstances. One project begets another project and another and down the rabbit hole you go. The subject of this article is power management; a project brought to the forefront by of all things our upcoming replacement of desktops with low-power Wyse thin clients. If that seems bizarre to you, allow me the chance to explain.

Fresh troubles have beset famous battery-car maker Tesla Motors, as the acrimonious divorce of its CEO and principal backer Elon Musk may imperil its finances and imminent IPO. Furthermore, there are signs that the lustre of the company's flagship Roadster sportscar may be dimming.

So much for the rebels socking it to The Man. The would-be "Spotify-killer" music service unveiled yesterday by former Kazaa founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis is happy to be owned by major labels. But Rdio won't extend the same offer to the Indie sector, The Register has learned.

Summer is here, sort of. The beaches are soon to be filled to capacity and anyone with any sense is clambering aboard the first plane to somewhere hot and sandy. That's a disaster for most cameras, which don't happily take to beaches, airport baggage handlers or seawater. Unless you've a 'ruggedised' model, of course,

The external disk storage market is back in rude health, according to IDC, with 17 per cent revenue growth in the first quarter. EMC, IBM, NetApp and Dell all recorded double-digit revenue growth, and NetApp leads the pack with a 47.4 per cent jump.

Beware, anybody working in music or movies industries who thinks a levy - one that raises a little pot of money - will save the day. Newspaper tycoons got there first and parked their backsides in the little pot, and won't budge.

Data governance can be dismissed as ‘applied common sense’, or balked at as an impossible endeavour which once embarked upon, will never end. The fact that one end of the data governance spectrum can seem a bit frightening means many organisations tend towards the other, and wind up doing the absolute minimum in order to get by.

Apple is hyping HTML5 again, this time with a new website purporting to show open web development in action. But the company's standards-following rivals have pointed out the Jobsian site is peddling nonsense.

A man whose social security number and other personal data were exposed by a company that processed his job application has no legal claims because no actual damage resulted from the privacy breach, a federal appeals court has ruled.